Abstract
In civil religion, the collective piety a society generates associates elements of civic religion (the political dimension) with elements of a common religion (the cultural dimension). In France, where the State has played a major role in national affirmation, the cult of the Republic and the tradition of France as the “first daughter of the Church” have marked the development of the collective imagination. Thus Frenchstyle civil religion takes the form of a lay religion with a background of Catholic culture. At the end of the 1980s, notably on the occasion of the bicentenary of the French Revolution, one witnessed the emergence of an ethical recomposition of civil religion around a certain ecumenism of human rights.